FUNDAMENTALS

We dreamed big when we created the KUDU, and our biggest dream was bringing people together.

The other stuff will come naturally; everybody has the capacity to become a good cook. Certainly we wouldn’t be so affected by and focused on cooking if it wasn’t something we were capable of mastering. ‘The first step to being great on the grill is wanting to be great on the grill,” as Chef Kevin Gillespie puts it – and the path to that greatness is available to you via the KUDU Safari Braai.

The process starts with the fundamentals of building your fire – we’ve provided a number of ways to do that. If you want to start with lump charcoal or briquettes and use KUDU’s charcoal chimneys, that’s great – the amount of charcoal it takes to fill our two chimneys up and light them is generally the right amount you need to start a good fire, so much of the mystery and guesswork is taken away. Same thing with a wood fire- if you build a fire in the center of your KUDU, the amount of wood that naturally fits inside there will start a good-sized fire that will create nice embers to cook over. The KUDU makes this simple and intuitive, which helps alleviate some of the intimidation that a more novice user might feel.

One of the most unconventional aspects about the KUDU is the elevated grate system, anchored by two metal bars on each side of the grill. That system is excellent at teaching the proper way to control heat when you’re cooking over a live fire. When you’re using a stove, of course you just turn the knob to control the heat; some people attempt to achieve the same result with an open flame by building smaller or larger fires while grilling, but this doesn’t usually work out as planned – if you don’t build your fire big enough, you won’t get the energy you need to cook your food properly, and if your fire gets too big too fast, it can easily become uncontrollable.

With the KUDU, depending on what you want to cook, you have an infinite range of heat levels and intensities available to you simply by raising and lowering the cooking surfaces. This is such a simpler and more practical concept than trying to control the one aspect of grilling that’s completely uncontrollable – fire. The open fire is one of the most thrilling aspects of cooking on a KUDU, but if you’re trying to get a fire to bend to your whim, you’re fighting a losing battle. It’s much more logical to achieve the results you want by changing your food’s distance from the heat source. The cool thing is that, because you’re using vertical and lateral movements on multiple surfaces on not one but two elevation bars, you have so many different options available for cooking – you can scramble eggs while at the same time grilling bacon or sausage and cooking French toast, and you can do it all without hassle.

The fact that the KUDU is designed to be portable is another unique aspect that plays right into this idea. You can pack it up, put it in the back of your car, and take it to a friend’s house to share the experience with them. There is no other true grilling system on the market that affords you the portability of the KUDU Safari Braai.